← hazelnut
patented
Raritan
OSU 539.031 × OSU 616.018
The record
- Parentage
- OSU 539.031 × OSU 616.018
- Origin
- Thomas J. Molnar, Shawn A. Mehlenbacher and John M. Capik · Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey · released 2020
- Rights
- patented — US Plant Patent PP32,460, filed 12 August 2019 by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Check the current term before propagating.
- Habit
- Vigorous, upright-spreading
- Nut
- Round kernels that fall free of the husk at maturity
- Blight
- A high level of tolerance to eastern filbert blight
- Pollination
- ‘Gene’ pollinizes all four Rutgers cultivars; ‘Slate’ pollinizes this one and ‘Somerset’
Description
The first of four cultivars Rutgers released in 2020, and named for the river the university sits on.
The programme’s whole point is geographic. Eastern filbert blight is native to the eastern United States and kept European hazelnuts out of it for a century; a New Jersey release exists to put the crop back where the disease came from. Note the wording the patent uses — a high level of tolerance, not immunity — and note that the resistance in these lines came out of two decades of germplasm screening rather than from ‘Gasaway’ alone. Broadening the genetic base of resistance is the direct answer to what happened to the single-gene cultivars in 2023.